Appeals court decision on Flynn doesn’t pass smell test

Shudder for the rule of law in our nation. Be alarmed that a politicized Justice Department will be allowed to do whatever it wants in service to a sitting president. Be amazed that judges can spout errant nonsense to reach a result that just happens to square with the interests of a president who shares their partisan leanings.

Yes, the decision by two judges to block efforts to scrutinize the Justice Department’s decision to drop its prosecution of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, is that disturbing.

Remember what’s involved here: Flynn pleaded guilty to two charges of lying to the FBI about his 2016 conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time, about sanctions President Barack Obama imposed on Russia for its interference in the 2016 campaign. Vice President Mike Pence later said that Flynn lied to him about the nature of his contacts with Russia.

After only 24 days on the job, Flynn was dismissed by Trump. The president said it was necessary because Flynn had admitted lying to Pence and the FBI.

That was then. But in Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department, the past can be miraculously rewritten. Guilty pleas can be erased. Anything that undermines former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump and Russian interference is A-OK.

So Justice moved to shut down the case by bizarrely claiming that Flynn’s admitted lies were not to material to a legitimate investigation.

District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan smelled political interference. He asked John Gleeson, a former judge, to advise on whether the Justice Department should be allowed to drop the case. Gleeson’s report this month was scathing. He accused the Justice Department of exercising a gross abuse of prosecutorial power to protect Flynn.

But Judge Neomi Rao, appointed by Trump, joined by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, ruled to stop Sullivan in his tracks..

“This is plainly not the rare case where further judicial inquiry is warranted.” Rao wrote, adding, “This is not the unusual case where a more searching inquiry is justified.”

Are you kidding?

Rao and Henderson sounded like defense lawyers for Barr’s department. “The district court’s appointment of the amicus and demonstrated intent to scrutinize the reasoning and motives of the Department of Justice constitute irreparable harms that cannot be remedied on appeal.”

Translation: God forbid that the truth be made public.

“These actions,” they wrote of Sullivan’s moves, “foretell not only that the scrutiny will continue but that it may intensify.

Translation: God forbid that the DOJ has to answer more questions.

Judge Robert L. Wilkins, appointed by Obama, was scathing in his dissent: “In 2017,” the thenacting attorney general told the vice president that Flynn’s false statements ‘posed a potential compromise situation for Flynn’ … and just a few months ago, the prosecution said that Flynn’s false statements to the FBI ‘went to the heart’ of a valid counterintelligence inquiry and ‘were absolutely material.’ Now, in a complete reversal, the government says none of this is true.”

With Trump and the Republican Senate speeding up their assembly line to load the benches with conservative judges, we need to face the consequences of what they’re doing. It’s very hard not to see the Flynn decision as partisan.

During a 2018 sentencing hearing, Sullivan told Flynn: “I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain, for this criminal offense.” Those are precisely the feelings we should have for a ruling that would leave the Justice Department unchallenged and unquestioned when it makes a decision that reeks of political favoritism.